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That didn't last long. Leave it to marketers to find a way to use any innovative new web service to promote their own ends. The latest example? A Chatroulette contest launched by international clothing brand French Connection.

On most websites nowadays, you'll see somewhere on the page, usually at the top right corner, links to the site's RSS feed, Twitter account, and Facebook fanpage. I've always wondered why MySpace, being the second largest social networking site by far, isn't on that list.

Last December, Alexa launched a new feature on their site - demographics. It measures the relative age, education, and gender of a site's users. It also measures where those users are browsing a site from (home, school, or work), and whether or not those users have children which is an odd statistic.

One day after Tiger Woods said he was taking an “indefinite break” from the PGA Tour to try to repair his marriage, Gillette became the first of his major sponsors to distance itself, saying it would limit his role in its marketing.

A new tracking code from Google Analytics was released recently. GA is a free web traffic reporting tool that let's you track how many users are viewing your website. The new code snippet uses an asynchronous process, meaning your site would load up without having to wait for the tracking code to finish executing.

Recently I've updated the Alexa Sparky add-on for FireFox 3.0, which displays website traffic rankings on the status bar. It's a nice little plugin that not only lets you see how large other sites are, but it also helps improve your rankings a little bit. After updating the add-on, I started noticing some strange behavior while browsing the web.

Rupert Murdoch, and a couple of his fellow newspaper-owners, say that traffic coming from search engines and aggregation sites are worthless. They call it "drive-by traffic." These users only come, read one article and then leave. For an industry profusely bleeding users and revenue, you would think they wouldn't be so discriminatory when it comes to users consuming their content.

As food makers lavish trips and goodies on parenting bloggers, critics see a shrewd marketing ploy. On most days, Andrea Deckard can be found in her home office, digging through stacks of coupons and grocery receipts for money saving tips and recipes that she can share with readers of her Mommy Snacks blog.

I'm just starting to submit stories from my blog to Digg, hoping against hope that they'll get some Digg love and drive some traffic back here. So far, no luck. The only Digg love my blog entries get is from me - and ONLY me. But I noticed a nice side effect - articles submitted to Digg almost instantly appear in Google's search results. Nice! Sure, the link goes to Digg, but from there, potential users can get here. It's a good trade-off.

Powerhouse Hollywood director Michael Bay, who returns to theaters worldwide on Wednesday with a "Transformers" sequel, has blasted the marketing efforts of the film's studio, Paramount Pictures.